This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Hello, hello, what's up my friends? It's Chris Guillebeau here, your host of Slattestle School. I hope you're doing well, whatever part of the world you're in. I have been speaking virtually via a digital environment using Zoom and other technologies to lots of different groups recently, all over the world, ever since the age of COVID-19 began, whatever point that was. It's hard to know when it started, what's gonna happen next, et cetera.
But it's been fun to be able to present, talk about the money tree, answer different questions and such, just have conversations using these digital virtual environments. If you represent a group that would like to have a conversation or presentation, et cetera, just let me know. You can always write into me from SlattestleSchool.com or just on my main website, chrisguillebeau.com. All right, here we are on a Thursday. At least this is a Thursday, the day the episode's going out, number 1237, 21 May.
In these segments, on Thursdays, we call them throwback Thursday slash where are they now, we take an in-depth look at someone whose story has evolved considerably since we first featured them. Now today in our latest feature, we'll hear from Julia Kelly, who was one of our very, very first case studies. I believe she was, I don't know, episode 15 or something on SlattestleSchool, which is 1215 or 1225 episodes ago, something like that. So that's pretty amazing. First week of January 2017, or second week we heard from her.
So Julia is a digital caricature artist who also owns another full-time accounting business. Both of these businesses are very profitable, but how has the global pandemic affected her work? She's got some thoughts about that, both as it relates to her business and perhaps some advice for you. All right, I really appreciate our sponsors allowing this program to be completely free to you. So here's a message on their behalf and then we will keep rolling.
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My name is Julia Kelly. I'm from San Diego, California. I am a caricature artist. The name of my company is JK Expressions and I was featured in episode 15. My side hustle is drawing digital caricatures for trade shows, conventions, and events.
I wanted to be a caricature artist ever since I was a little kid. I didn't think I could make a living at it, so I studied accounting in college. However, while in college, I applied on a whim to draw caricatures at Legoland here in San Diego. I got the job. I spent a summer drawing caricatures at the park.
Started freelancing that fall and here we are. Before I started making money from doing caricatures, I was a part-time graphic designer at a nonprofit and I was also going to college full-time. My current day job is running Ridget's Bookkeeping and Accounting, which is a company I started with a friend of mine in 2016. I knew I wanted to have a big company and I studied the models of the kinds of companies that you can grow big if you're doing corporate entertainment like caricatures. It turns out that that just wasn't the type of company that I wanted to grow.
So a friend and I started Ridget's, which serves small businesses who need remote bookkeeping and accounting. We now have four employees and serve over 50 small businesses around the country. Before COVID, I was kind of running around like a chicken with my head cut off. I was still doing caricature gigs while running Ridget's and specifically now I was gearing up for spring trade show season, which is really busy for JK expressions and it requires a lot of travel. But now since all my gigs got canceled and I've been able to focus 100% on Ridget's, I've honestly been really enjoying it.
I think I'll always do caricatures on the side, but this shutdown has made me realize that splitting my focus the way that I was was pretty counterproductive. Specifically for caricatures, if you want to do live caricatures, you have to get in front of people and start drawing live as soon as you possibly can. No matter how good you get or how much you practice at home, if you can't produce art on the spot with a dozen people looking over your shoulder, you're not gonna be a good event artist. So do free gigs if you have to, but as quickly as possible, get comfortable with drawing live and on the clock. I'm really glad I had a backup business that allows me to keep bringing in income, even in a pandemic.
I'm also really glad that Ridget's didn't specialize and only serve coffee shops or restaurants, which we had planned on doing originally. We were thinking of niching down into one of those areas. So it's kind of hard to plan for a once in a century pandemic. And I kind of lucked into being prepared to weather the storm, but maybe think about how to make your business anti-fragile and/or have a backup plan. Again, I didn't plan it, but I'm really glad that it worked out this way.
Thank you so much, Julia. Really appreciate that detailed and honest update. I've been following her work for, as I said, several years now. I actually told her story in more detail in the "Side Hustle" book. So I guess two or three books ago now.
And I just think it's interesting how she has been able to build two businesses at the same time, essentially. So, as you heard, running two businesses at the same time got a little bit stressful earlier this year. And perhaps it was a silver lining when she could no longer focus as much on those events. And now she's doing more of the accounting. In her words, she said, I'm really glad I had a backup business that allows me to keep bringing in income, even in a pandemic.
Now, of course, not everybody out there is gonna be able to start two businesses at once. I think this is more of a long-term goal, like she's been doing this a long time. So if you're listening and you're like, I haven't even started my first idea, well, that's okay. Look to people like Julia as the ultimate outcome of where you want to be. And of course, I'm sure Julia would be the first to say that she's still on a journey.
She's got a lot to learn just like me and everybody. But the point is we all start from somewhere. So the goal is to build something, to protect yourself in the event of something unexpected, even something tremendously unexpected or unpredictable like the age that we have been in for a while now. Now, I also like what Julia said about anti-fragile. I don't know if you missed that.
She just mentioned it very briefly. That was my word of the year, either last year or the year before. This concept of anti-fragility, it's a word coined by Nassim Taleb, another writer who's also an expert in probability theory and lots of other stuff. The idea of anti-fragile is that in the English language, there's no word for the opposite of fragile. When we often think of something being resilient and a lot of people talk about like resilience and the power of resilience, but if something is resilient, it just means it holds up under stress.
So you put some stress or strain on a person, for example, and they're able to hold up, that's resilient. But to be anti-fragile means you actually get better. You actually improve under stress and strain. And once I started understanding this more and thinking about it, I was like, wow, that's what I want for my life. And so I think about that, not just with my business, but my life in general.
Still, if you're thinking about how do I grow my side hustle? How do I turn this into a business? I think what Julia has done, I mean, she used the word herself, but I think what she has done is a living example of the concept of if one business is gonna take a hit, her other one is poised to do well because small businesses still need accounting services. Even now in particular, they need creative solutions. They need help, they need her expertise.
So well done again, Julia and listeners. Let's all work on our plan to be anti-fragile. 2020 is our year of interaction. Last year was anti-fragile, that was just me. Year of interaction for everybody this year.
If you have a question, if you'd like to update us about your side hustle, if you'd like a free caricature drawing, actually for that, you just need to do one yourself because you don't want one from me, come to sidehustleschool.com/questions, at least for the first two things. We'll be featuring them throughout the year along with updates from other listeners as they launch their projects. Thank you so much, take care of yourself wherever you are. I'll be back again tomorrow with another episode. My name is Chris Guillebeau, this is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
- From the Onward Project.
